I live in the Isle of Man. Our office shouldn't need air conditioning - even in high summer the temperature outside rarely exceeds 20C - but the building design is terrible. There are these vents in the ceiling but al they do is recirculate air from the vent 8 feet away. It gets to about 28C in the summer and the air is stagnant and moist. The best I can do is open a window that opens into another part of the building that happens to be a little bit cooler.

Right now, Sol has more influence on my AC than anything. We can turn on the air full blast, but that doesn't get the temperature to where it's supposed to be. It's a big hassle when the set temperature is needed for temperature sensitive equipment rather than human comfort.

I have the opposite problem. I work in a building that has won awards for its energy efficiency - I guess all it takes to get an award is a roof painted white and some Solatubes [solatube.com], because some idiot put the thermostat on a wall that gets full sun from 1pm-sunset. This ironic arrangement makes the whole room an icebox... a 100x300 foot electronics manufacturing area with 30 foot ceilings.

Plus, I sit in a cubicle walled off from the rest of the production floor. The AC blows against the wall above me and th

They spent a bunch of money to "fix" the HVAC in our office. It was so cold I would wear two shirts to work and sometimes a jacket (i sit right below the vent), and fingerless gloves while typing just so my hands wouldn't go numb.

So what did our overly-controlling, micro-managing asshat of a business manager do? she had the thermometer for the new system installed in the heart of the office (hers), along with the control, so no one can ever get at it except her. I wear smartwool and a base layer to work now, as well as a dress shirt, plus a jacket sometimes. In southern california summer.

My pet peeve is a different one (and sorry for using Celsius, we Europeans are weird).HVAC works well, if left alone. But where I work people fiddle with it all the time. The general problem I have seen is that people set the air conditioning too low during summer and too high during winter.

I consider 24 degrees (76F) to be the standard indoors temperature. My home AC is forever set at this temperature, be it winter or summer. However, I am seeing people insisting on setting the AC to as low as 18C (65F) du

I worked with someone who had zero clue about this kind of thing. She had her window open and claimed that cold air would run down into the furnace vent, back to the furnace, and then it would detect the cold air and turn on. She used to be a paramedic. Scary.

Actually, that's what the thermostat in the last apartment I lived in was like. You couldn't turn it up or down a couple degrees to make either the AC or heat come on or go off. You had to move the lever at least half way up or down its path to get its attention.

When people come inside from a 35C day, they want to cool off as quickly as possible, so cold air, high fan speed. When they come in from a wet, dreary 12C day (I'm assuming a Med climate, like my own city (southern Oz), no "real" winters) they want to warm up quickly, as if standing by a roaring fire. On top of all that, you have the psychological "chill" of seeing it grey and cold and windy outside.

Then throw in that most HVACs are garbage, with no zoning, so you inevitably have the offices on the... err,

In my office there are two zones, but the thermostats are right next to each other. So that half the office is freezing and the other half is a sauna. Have to set the hot side a few degrees lower to get any kind of comfort.

Actually, to me it always made more sense that the indoors temperature should to a certain degree follow the outdoor temp - during the winter I have more clothes on, so I preffer a bit colder. During the summer I work in a t-shirt and shorts, so make it warmer please!

In the end, we end up only running the AC a few months in the middle of the summer + running the heat (waterborne radiator under the desk, perfect to rest my feet on when they're cold:) ) through the winter. We do have AC in this corridor (top

That's because people think that if you set the thermostat to either extreme, it will magically cool or heat faster. It doesn't. It cools/heats until the desired temperature is reached; that's it! The time it takes to reach said temperature is based on the delta T. If you want to improve the time it takes, you have to physically reengineer the HVAC system with new equipment (compressor, heater, blower, etc).

I work in a small office (8 employees) and the thermostat is actually in my office so I have full control! Of course people keep coming in to try and fiddle with it, but as soon as they leave I just reset it back t what it was. I just don't understand, we leave it at 23-24 in the winter and 25-27 in the summer. THe problem is that the building and HVAC system is extremely old so the offices at the end of the run are never at good temperatures. in the winter they way to cold and summer way to hot. IN the wi

It's not illogical when you consider that a big portion of what you experience with regards to a temperatures bearability is based on humidity. In a very dry climate, 40C won't feel bad. In a very humid climate, you can start sweating at 16C.

What you're observing is compensation for the amount of humidity in the air. People turn up the AC in summer because it tends to be more humid, and up the heat in winter because it tends to be much drier.

You can observe this first hand if you go to a good spa, the finnish sauna (which is bone dry) will be set to 120C, while the steam room (which is very wet) will be set at 40C. They'll both feel hot but the finnish sauna won't feel 3x as hot as the steam room. That's because a bone dry sauna of 40C won't feel warm, while a steam room of 120C would cook you like a lobster.

"a big portion of what you experience with regards to a temperatures bearability is based on humidity. In a very dry climate, 40C won't feel bad. In a very humid climate, you can start sweating at 16C."

In addition to that, the temperature is only sampled at one point. There can be quite a difference between temperature of supply and exhaust. I think a normal office should be ventilated at 100 m3/h

A human, with computer and lighting (250 W) can generate 8 C temperature increase. If you're unlucky with the ai

40C in a dry climate feels terrible to me. In fact dry climates I find pretty awful. I end up with horribly chapped lips (someone once told me that this is because you're not drinking enough water, well, I was drinking so much water that I had to go to the toilet every 15 minutes and the urine was colourless).

When I was living in Houston (which is hot and humid in the summer) I visited some friends in Utah, and after 3 days I had had enough of the bone dry climate. It felt so great to walk out the airport i

You will feel uncomfortable and leave the sauna well before the sauna causes your blood to boil.

It's the same as with cooking. If you put a pot of water into an oven it doesn't start boiling immediately after you put it in the oven. It takes time for the heat to transfer to the water, and excite the water to a boiling point. Same concept.

Sweat. Air is actually a pretty bad conductor of heat, so you don't heat up that fast. Meanwhile, you're sweating profusely, and evaporating sweat carries away a lot of heat. You can't sustain it for that long before you get dehydrated, but dehydration is the main limiting factor on how long you can stand it.

Typical AC will chill the air until it's colder than the desired temperature to dehumidify it and then warm it back up.

Typical AC will chill the air below the dewpoint, but will not reheat that air (except for the couple of degrees that the heat of the fan adds). In fact, most energy codes prohibit using energy to cool and then using more energy to reheat (except in certain circumstances where it may be vital, such as humidity-controlled labs, pharmaceutical plants, etc.). Only the more sophisticated, ex

Seems backward to me. I set it to 70F in the summer and we let it drop to 64F in the winter. It's a balance of comfort and costs, I'd prefer it just below 70F year round but already at 70F in Texas we have quite the bill.

Drill a small hole on the other side of the wall -- opposite the thermostat. Get a can of Freez-it [chemtronics.com], and periodically spray some through the hole to cool the thermometer. (An upside-down can of canned air will also work, and you might even be able to get the company to pay for it.)

That's SOP around here. Loftgreens even sells the necessary kits that go up above the grate to make the throttling less obvious too.

The downside is that if too many people throttle theirs, then some poor schmuck is stuck receiving all of the surplus, or the performance of the machine suffers elsewhere. The best choice is to install multiple sensors that report to the controller, and to lightly calibrate dampening over a few weeks based on reports from the sensors, but that requires time, effort, and mo

The thermostat is an on/off switch for your heating and cooling demands.

Most air conditioning control systems are 24 volt, color-coded 24 to 28 gauge wiring bundles. The red wire (r terminal) typically brings 24v to the thermostat. When the thermostat closes the switch on a call for cooling the (typically) yellow wire is energized at the y terminal inside the thermostat, and when the t-stat closes on a call for heating the (typically) white wire is energized at the w terminal.

Any nerd competent enough to take the front off the thermostat to look at the wiring color scheme at the terminals can easily install a remote switch above a drop ceiling in an office to override "no call" from the t-stat or to break the 24v to the control.

Cautionary tale: never energize your auxiliary control in heat if the primary t-stat is in cooling mode, or vice-versa, as this will allow the magic smoke in the blower motor to escape. Most systems run on two different airflow speeds for heating and cooling.

Mid 1980s I worked for a University, at one of the labs, and they installed non-resettable thermostats - they used little plug-in modules set for a certain temperature, and put them inside a tamper-resistant enclosure, because they just knew we would not leave things as they were. Of course, it was always too hot in summer, and too cold in winter. No problem. In the summer, when it was too hot in the office, we just aimed a small heater at it, until the temperature in the office was to our satisfaction. In

I read a post in a magazine a couple decades ago with a similar fix for a thermostat locked in a clear vented box, inside someone's apartment.The heat wasn't warm enough in the winter, and they were freezing, so they taped a bag of ice cubes over the thermostat's box. Worked like a charm.

There is nothing worse than an open thermostat in a small office. We have people here setting the cool setting to 76 and heat settings to 80. When I tell them that it's completely unreasonable, let's at least shoot for 74 degrees I have to endure hate crimes for being dressed in something other than the thinnest material above and below the waistline.

A few summers ago I was in the cube where the air conditioning sent in the cold air. Unfortunately the cube with the temperature sensor was occupied by a guy with a space heater. As the aircon pumped in more and more cold air I ended up taking warmth breaks standing outside in the summer sun. Finally, after a long negotiation between my neighbor and the HVAC guy, sanity was restored.

At my last job, I had a bunch of vents in my office ceiling. It was like a scene from Brazil. Two were AC. I could control one but not the other. Heat came out of other vents and I had no control over the heat. But I could turn on my AC while the heat was on. Another vent pumped out air all the time that was neither heated nor chilled. Because I had a thermostat on my wall, people assumed I had [ET]Ultimate Power[/ET] over the temperature. Didn't matter how many times I told them, "I can only make i

I think I saw an office building like that. One Wall had 10 thermostats, that controlled every section of the building, except the room that contained them. No idea where that was. I'd have to guess it was behind a wall or something after one of the many renovations the old office building had been through over its 70 year history.

Ostensibly, the temperature in my (University staff, large, single-person) office is controlled by the thermostat in the classroom next door. (Problem #1, obviously.) This means that there have been a number of times where someone in that room (no idea whether it was a student or professor; don't really care) has cranked the temperature one way or the other. Usually down.

However, the aforementioned thermostat is also a bit wonky. I frequently go in there, feeling a little cold, to turn it up, and find that while it's set to about 70, it's reading a temperature of 65 and blowing cold air. Turning it up to 72 will cause it to cheerfully start blowing hot air for a while. (I have also gone in to lower it, and found that while it's set to 72, it's reading 76 or so. Go figure.)

None of this can hold a candle to what I experienced when a teenager teaching myself programming one summer on a computer in my father's lab at the college he teaches at. One of the several heater units in that room was on, and I asked if we could turn it off. Apparently, not only could we not turn it off, but the HVAC for that building was, at that time, managed by a company in a city an hour's drive away. OK, so, call the company, let them know that the heater is on in 80 degree weather.

Nope. "Our computer system shows that heater as off." "Well, I'm right next to it, and I can tell you it's on. It's blowing hot air. The one next to it isn't." "No, sir; our system shows it as off, therefore, it is off."

And that was pretty much the end of it.

(Fortunately, that section of the building was demolished a decade later, and replaced with one that wasn't a) designed in the '70s, and b) intended to be temporary.)

That's just idiotic. I've heard of these remote control companies, but their operator should have been trained in the basic failure modes of HVAC equipment. Most heaters have a failsafe mechanism. If for some reason the heating element shorts to ground (or the burner kicks on) the circulation fan will blow to prevent the thing from catching on fire. Happened at my office one summer. A single phase of the 480V element had shorted, and the vent fan kicked on. None of us could figure figure it out until we cra

Where I work, the hvac systems are from about 1955. An air compressor powers the pneumatically controlled system. Some of it has been disconnected or replaced over the years (the boiler is from the 80s or 90s, but I must say this old engineering is amazingly robust and we already have parts failing on our 8 year old building additions.

In the middle of summer where your shoes melt to the asphalt on the way to the entrance, the inside is frigid. EVERYONE there keeps a coat on their chair, some even wear mittens because its cold enough to cramp/give your fingers arthritis. The theory is that by constantly pumping in arctic air, the building owners can charge for more electricity.

The set points for winter and summer seem to be the same. That means in winter when the heat runs it is about 2C over the set point. Then in summer it is about 2C under the set point. Stupid waste of energy.

Also it means inside it is shorts weather when outside it is gloves and hat. Then inside it is sweater weather when outside it is skin weather.

Much of our building is converted warehouse space, so the HVAC is rather patchwork. On any given day, regardless of the season, one part of the building will be too hot, one will be too cold, and one will be just right. You won't know what the conditions will be in your part of the building, however, until you get to the office.

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works.
When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we
freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything
the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

The HVAC systems never seem to be set up correctly, and filter too much air into one room at the expense of others. So parts of the building will always be cold and parts will be hot. We just moved to a completely new building in a completely new office park, and exact same problem.

Our thermostat lives on an intranet page, and keeps a public log of everyone who's fiddled with it. The older buildings have a handful of climate zones per floor, but the newer ones have independent thermostats in every office.

actually, that icing condition sounds like the system was almost out of freon. the system will start putting out extreme cold but efficiency goes to shit (ie, the electric bill would make warren buffet cry)

Some years ago I worked in a very large firm which had corporate temperature policies. Thermostats in our work area had actual key locks on them to prevent us from changing the temperature.

The fellow in the cube next to me brought in his own thermostat and ran wires to it, and kept it hidden in his desk. For weeks the building maintenance guys kept coming by and resetting the thermostat...

The thermostat runs the heater based exclusively on the outside temperature. This is laughably called "weather controlled heating". The basic idea is that the building loses heat to the environment based on the temperature difference. So if you know the outside temperature and the rate of heat loss, you should be able to get a constant temperature inside, no?Of course there are big problems with this:- The placement of the temperature sensor (yes, just one) is critical. If it's in the shade, it'll miss the

I have had an office in three different buildings on campus of my university. The first office was fine. I had a situation in the second building where the noise was in violation of Eurpoean Union standards for noise (I had the level measured with a SPL meter) but a couple of dB too low for OSHA. It was maddening; for months I begged facilities to address the issue. The office suite I was in had been converted from a lecture hall and there was this major HVAC hub above my desk, and it turned out they had th

The discussion hasn't touched much on home offices. I have full power, but I also pay the bills. My problem is that I work in the basement and do not have dual zone heat. If I want the basement warm, I have to heat the whole house.

So, I am kind of in the same boat as office minions but for different reasons. The solution is the same - space heater under the desk.

Reasonably large office (80 people a floor), one side gets the morning sun and is usually too hot, the other side seems to be where the thermostat is so they are at room temperature all year round, my side too hot in the summer and in the winter too hot in the morning followed by a bit cool in the afternoon. They do supply desk fans though so it is a fun balance of pushing air at each other depending on who is hot/cold at the moment.

All is well and dandy when the first-floor tenants are open for business, but one of the first-floor shops is a hair salon that isn't open on Mondays...and in the winter, it's noticeably cooler on Mondays.

I do know, but nobody's complaining. I only know because one time, when a guy changed desks, he complained that it was too cold at his new location, and the building maintenance guy came up and tweaked his vent, which fixed the problem, and since then, nobody else has complained.

Which doesn't really leave me with anything to chose on this poll, but oh well. Par for the course.:)

We have a placebostat on the wall. You can spin the dial and watch the little LCD numbers change, but it doesn't seem to have any real effect on the HVAC. If I get too uncomfortable I walk into the server room. There I can get any temperature I want just by picking which rack I stand next to.

I used to work in an older building at Boeing. Flat roof, no insulation, cinder block walls. It was kept at about 80 to 82F all year round. Summer, I understand. But during the winter? I figured it was due to higher occupancy than allowed for in the original design plus employees now having more heat generating devices in the form of PCs. According to management, the order was given to turn the t'stats up to 80F to save on air conditioning.

Yes, in fact I scan the HVAC frequency and hear all the gossip. Overall they do a fairly good job considering number of buildings. Occasionally there are problems with our building (if boiler goes down, requires unique part that takes a few days to receive and then a couple days to install and power up.).

Years ago I attended a ASHRAE meeting and topic was "Sick Buildings" and mentioned how HVAC systems were installed way back when such that, "what were they thinking?" i.e. intake ducts in parking lots so

In the building I work in, the temperature is set to 21 degrees Celsius. There are thermostats all over the place but most are dummy boxes connected to nothing. There have been arguments between a few colleagues as to what temperature one of the fake controls should be set to. I thought it was funnier to see them bicker over it than let them know the controls are useless.

Often the problem is that the theremostat is not placed anywhere that makes sense.

One place I used to work, I discovered, through trial and error, that the temperature in one room was controlled by a thermostat in a totally disconnected workspace. Since the people in the workspace always wanted it warmer, the temperature in the disconnected room (which was basically sealed off behind a big thick locked door) would run away to 85 or 90, which would cause the temperature in the refrigerator in that room to go

I work from home often. However, I installed solar energy about 11 years ago. I have to rent the meter (around $6 a month) but other than that I haven't paid for electricity since that event. I have natural gas heating, and the cost of that has been reduced substantially over the past few years.

My point is that I leave the thermostat set to a low of 72 degrees and a high of 76 degrees and let the system figure how to keep the house in that range. Works well, all year around. Very comfortable.

I would say it's a combination of poor installation and calibration. Where I work, facilities has a big binder where an engineer was supposed to measure and calibrate every room, but it is completely devoid of measurements and signatures. Maybe the calibration is an extra cost? I kind of miss the manual vent controls of old days. Those would make nearly everyone happy.

When I was younger, I had a summer job at a Subway. Obviously, the presence of customers ensured the place was kept at a comfortable temperature. However, one day, our A/C broke down. It was rather unpleasant, especially since we were baking bread continuously through the day.

Customer complains didn't help the issue, obviously. At one point, an African-American co-worker had had enough, and answered one such complaint, "You're telling me?! It's so hot in here it done turned me black!" Good times.